The Tentacles Of Federal Funding

The government forbids arts agencies funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to present any ``obscene`` art.

Under pressure from the federal drug czar, Stanford University has fired an instructor who said he carried drugs in his backpack on campus.

And now the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government may prohibit federally funded family-planning clinics from giving their clients advice about abortion.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

For decades opponents of big government have warned that government funding would mean government control. That insight, of course, is part of our folk wisdom: ``He who pays the piper calls the tune.`` ``Who takes the king`s shilling sings the king`s song.`` As each new program was created, opponents warned that government money always comes with strings attached.

But as long as liberals were in charge of both the funding and the control, they ignored the warnings. Government funding of everything under the sun was not only a way of redistributing wealth, it was a way of bringing everyone`s actions under the control of progressive, fair-minded bureaucrats in Washington.

The laws sounded reasonable enough: Any college, or business, or hospital, or nonprofit agency that is a recipient of federal funds must abide by certain federal regulations. After all, it was reasoned, the federal government has a responsibility to monitor how taxpayers` money is being spent. So firms that did business with the government became subject to affirmative-action regulations, and health and safety regulations, and medical cost-containment rules, and drug-free workplace requirements.

Colleges that eagerly took the carrot of federal funding soon felt the stick of federal regulations. They faced myriad reporting requirements, especially to document compliance with anti-discrimination rules. Every member of Congress who had a good idea about how colleges should be run added an amendment to an appropriations bill: Any college receiving federal funds shall do thus and so.

But soon it came to pass that almost every company in America was doing some business with the feds and every college was receiving federal aid. It became almost impossible to escape the tentacles of Leviathan. And still the liberals in Washington were not worried, because they were writing the regulations.

But then came the 1980 election, and suddenly there were conservatives staffing the all-powerful federal government and imposing their values on the recipients of federal aid. Addicted to the narcotic of taxpayers` money, most recipients felt they had no choice but to comply.

Conservatives had once opposed most of the grant-making programs-federal aid to education, and health care, and the arts, and family-planning clinics, and so on. They had said that taxpayers were already overburdened, that such programs belonged at the state or local level if anywhere, and that the freedom and diversity of our society would be threatened by the spread of federal aid and control. But now, finding themselves in control of the federal purse strings, they decided it would be easier to make the programs reflect conservative values than to abolish the agencies and programs.

And so they did: using the Education Department to support a traditional curriculum, giving money to conservative scholars and foundations rather than liberal ones, putting anti-abortion restrictions on family-planning clinics, restricting the National Endowment for the Arts` ability to fund gay and avant-garde artists, proposing to forbid anti-racist speech codes on campus.

And suddenly liberals discovered the danger of big government. They wailed that the federal government was censoring, stifling, restricting-as indeed it was, and had been for decades. Only now it was conservatives doing the censoring and restricting.

Duke University law professor Walter Dellinger warned that such rules are ``especially alarming in light of the growing role of government as subsidizer, landlord, employer and patron of the arts.``

Dellinger is right. But the only way to solve the problem he raises is to reduce the government`s role in society. Surely we can`t expect taxpayers just to hand over $1.5 trillion a year to various agencies and interests without regulating how the money is spent. Their representatives in Congress and the administration think that those who are paying for the education, or the art, or the medical care have a right to say just what they will and will not pay for.